Ulster veto, Ulster terror

By Alexander Cockburn, The Nation, 14 May 1999

If Bill Clinton finds time to look up from the debacle of NATO's
bombing of Serbia, he will find that Protestant hold-outs in Northern
Ireland are on the verge of denying him the only legitimate foreign
policy triumph he can lay claim to: namely, the crucual role of his
government and indeed himself, in brokering a settlement for Northern
Ireland.

Unless Clinton instantly flexes some muscle, the entire Good Friday
Agreement, joyously ratified in April of 1998, is about to run off the
rails, sabotaged by Protestant irreconcilables who think, maybe
correctly, that once again they can impose the Unionist Veto, as they
have time after bloodstained time down the decades. The instrument at
hand is the issue of decommissioning IRA weapons.

It's a fraud, but one that is being all too easily regurgitated in
the press here. Story after story has appeared teling the tale that
the IRA is welshing on a solemn agreement to hand in its guns, and
that said refusal is quite reasonably prompting reluctance on the part
of David Trimble and his Ulster Unionist Party to pursue the terms of
the peace process to which Trimble set his name, thus earning him a
share of the Nobel Peace Prize.

The Good Friday Agreement set forth a route map to settlement of the
border question, involving the creation of various institutions,
including a Northern Ireland Executive in which Sinn Fein would have
seats. The decommissioning of illegal arms was explicitly
set—and this is the actual language of the agreement—in
the context of the implementation of the overall settlement.
Everyone knew then, just s everyone knows now, that the IRA will never
unilaterally disarm, especially when on either side of the prescribed
road to peace stand—in ascending order of organized and
well-armed capacity for violence—the loyalist gangs, the Royal
Ulster Constabulary and the British Army. Burned into the IRA's
historical consciousness is the terrible memory of 1968–69, when
Catholic areas, unarmed and defenseless, faced loyalist mobs, and the
bitter jibe was that IRA stood for I Ran Away.

Suppose Sinn Fein made it a condition of implementation of the
agreement that the RUC be disbanded, that all military barracks in the
Six Counties be closed?

I've seen one estimate suggesting that in Northern Ireland there
are 135,000 legally held weapons, 90 percent of them in the hands of
unionists. No one is asking for this arsenal to be decommissioned.
Indeed, Christy Ward of THE IRISH PEOPLE suggests that the
International Commission on hand out weapons permits to allow the IRA
to bring its armory up to par.

The decommissioning tactic now used by Trimble looks more than usually
hollow, because at long last the secret history of the British dirty
war in Northern Ireland is unraveling.

It's becoming ever more clear that just as death squads in Central
America saw a chain of instigation, command and control, supply,
payment and protection stretching from the imperial power, via the
CIA, through to local client military forces, police, employers'
associations, goon squads and paid psychopaths, so too have the
British been operating such death squad networks in Northern Ireland.

The most explosive evidence of these networks now comes in the form of
an affidavit by former RUC Special Branch officer John Weir. (Thanks
to my colleagues Carl Bromley and Joe Guinan for securing this and for
overall help here). Its twenty-nine pages, thus far unreported in the
United States, lie before me, destroying forever the fundamental
premise of the decommissioning ploy, which is that the British Army
and the RUC can be regarded as honest brokers and custodians of the
Good Friday Agreement, ready to protect Catholic communities in the
North in the event they are menaced by loyalists after the IRA turns
in its guns.

The most immediate function of Weir's affidavit, signed February
1999, is to lend legal support to Sean McPhilemy, whose book THE
COMMITTEE, published here last year, gave an extensive account of the
death squad apparatus. Now Weir lays out the chilling narrativein
sixty-two detailed paragaraphs, replete with murders committed by RUC
officers and by paramilitaries controlled and protected by the RUC or
instigated by British Army officers.

Paragraph 3 shows why the IRA won't just give up its guns:

I recall that in 1970 or 1971, while I was serving as a young [RUC]
constable, age 20, in Strandtown, there was an arms amnesty in which
members of the public habded in substantial quantities of guns and
ammunition of different types. Many of these guns were then given out
by RUC officers to local members of a Loyalist paramilitary
organisation, the Ulster Defence

Association, with the knowledge of the senior officers in my RUC
station.

In clinical terms Weir details how antiterrorist units in the RUC,
known as Special Patrol Groups, initiated attacks on the Catholic
population. He explains how two of the most awful bombings, in
Monaghan and in Dublin (in which thirty-three died) were accomplished
with explosives supplied by an officer in the British Army's
Ulster Defense Regiment, assembled in a farmhouse owned by an RUC
officer and carried out by a group including a UDR officer. Weir
adds:

Although these two bombings were among the worst atrocities of the
Irish troubles, those responsible for them were never even questioned
by the RUC and [British] Army intelligence knew, within days of the
bombings, the identities of the culprits.

He further adds that it is quite possible that the RUC and Army
intelligence knew about the attacks in advance.

Weir also describes how and Army Intelligence officer, Robert Nairac,
first used an RUC officer to attack the Catholic population, then
arranged his murder by the IRA to ensure that he would never be able
to reveal the truth about [his] role. Weir himself was finally
convicted of a muder in which he admits minor involvement. He was
released in 1992 and, in fear for his life, immigrated to Nigeria,
returning to Northern Ireland last December.

Weir's affidavit should strike the decommissioning ploy stone
dead. It's the moment for Clinton to do some arm-twisting and
tell his pal Blair that there's urgent business in Northern
Ireland. It's a more constructive path than bombing schools in
Serbia.